Inside the Bribery Scandal Sweeping Through the Oil Industry

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/inside-the-bribery-scandal-sweeping-through-the-oil-industry/ar-BBJ5Cxm

A top oil executive walked into the marble lobby of an exclusive Milan hotel on a chilly winter night. His dinner date was a former Nigerian oil minister offering to sell one of Africa’s biggest untapped oil discoveries.

Eight years later, the question of whether the $1.3 billion paid for the license to that prized oil field was mostly a bribe is at the heart of one of the biggest bribery scandals the oil industry has ever seen.

Part of a broader crackdown, the case has reached into the highest levels of the executive ranks of Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the second-largest Western oil company—including wiretaps on its chief executive—and into Eni SpA, Italy’s state-backed oil company.

Italian prosecutors say Claudio Descalzi, the senior Eni executive at the Milan dinner, and high-level Shell officials approved an arrangement that allowed them to pay the government while knowing most of the money would be transferred to a company controlled by Dan Etete—the ex-oil minister Mr. Descalzi met that night, according to court documents. The prosecutors say executives knew Mr. Etete would pay off Nigerian officials and send kickbacks to Eni executives. A criminal trial begins in Milan on March 5.

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